Managing your Buildings using BIM

I managed to get up to Northumbria University today for one of the BIM Seminars that BIM Academy are currently running:

- http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/bne/collaboration/enterprise/bimacademy/bimseminars/

I attended a fascinating presentation from Iwan Peverett and two of my former NBS colleagues Dr Jane Matthews and Prof Steve Lockley.

Iwan Peverett looks at visualisation techniques for City Planners

Iwan started by presenting some of his work from the Newcastle-Gateshead project to model the city. Iwan had previously worked on the modelling of Glasgow city centre. The initial aim of the project had been to help with the planning process in terms of visualisation. But it was was interesting to see how this had progressed to look at additional issues such as street lighting and tree preservation. The huge 3D model was being seen as an "anchor" to place business information against.

One of the key considerations was said to be "level of detail". Make sure you can maintain what you model, else confidence will be ruined as items go out of date pretty quickly.

Dr Jane Matthews looks at the model of Northumbria University Campus

Jane then looked at how detail had been added to the Northumbria University Campus area of the Newcastle-Gateshead model. This had three main uses:

1. To assist with the FM tasks carried out by Northumbria Uni Estates Dept.
2. To be a catalyst for further research projects
3. To be a starting point for student projects

This model was actually being used and updated for the new university nursery building. In addition, one building "The Ellison Building" had been modelled to greater detail - all rooms and FF&E including fire equipment. Fantastic to see how you can go from an area the size of Newcastle-Gateshead to a university campus to a building, to a room, to a fire extinguisher.

Prof Steve Lockley demonstrates some of BIM Academy's big projects to date

Steve then talked about some of the unexpected benefits such as asbestos and carcinogenic material registers. He also discussed how Google had now sold SketchUp as they were automating the creation of buildings on Google Earth.

A beautiful visualisation of Newcastle upon Tyne generated from the City Model

Other fantastic projects mentioned were

1. http://www.openbim.org/ - the xBIM toolkit that works around IFC.
2. The National BIM Library that NBS have launched with the help of BIM Academy
3. The iCIM TSB project
4. The 4BIM TSB project

And then finally, plenty of good discussion on standards and software for BIM.

Also good to see many familiar faces such as Clare from Leeds Met, Catriona from CENE, Adam from BIM Technologies, Ed from kykloud and of course all of the BIM Academy gang.

More seminars are coming up in July - check out the schedule at:

- http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/bne/collaboration/enterprise/bimacademy/bimseminars/